April 20, 2022
To whom it may concern,
The proposal above is extremely short-sighted and will only serve to further alienate a rapidly expanding base of retail investors from US markets. Whether the large Wall Street firms/other financial intermediaries that lobby for rules such as this like it or not there is a growing number of independent investors both within the US and outside that are becoming more financially literate. The fact is that rule proposals such as this that serve to make financial markets less transparent will no longer be accepted without a significant loss of trust in the institutions that regulate the market such as the SEC.
Retail investors such as myself make financial decisions based on publicly available information in an effort to improve our circumstances and to attempt to try and get ahead in life. When the SEC takes such a clear stance as this it shows that you are on the side of those that are already at an insurmountable advantage and it is extremely disheartening to see. How long before a significant portion of the American/International community withdraw their capital from your markets and seek other ways to grow their capital in a fair and equitable alternative? The writing is on the wall with the onset of emerging technologies and I think I can speak for many like-minded people in saying that there are enough of us to accomplish this successfully, with or without support from regulatory organisations such as yours. To that view I strongly implore the SEC to discard this proposal so that it can demonstrate to its tax-paying country men and supportive international investors such as myself that it will stand on the right side of history.
We want more transparency, not complex backdoor solutions that enable bad actors to escape their moral, fiduciary, and ethical responsibilities as market participants. I'm sure there is a majority of people working for and representing the SEC that share the same view and are similarly frustrated at such clearly one-sided proposals. Please backtrack on this.
Yours faithfully,
Jin heo Kim